Mike Meginnis, Fat Man and Little Boy. Black Balloon Publishing, 2014.
excerpt
mike-meginnis.com/
Two bombs over Japan. Two shells.
One called Little Boy, one called Fat Man. Three days apart. The one implicit in the other.
Brothers.
The winner of the 2013 Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize, Fat Man and Little Boy pulses with magical realism in an unprecedented approach to its tragic subject matter.
In this powerful debut novel, the atomic bombs dropped on Japan are personified, born on impact as human beings—as a Fat Man and a Little Boy. Their small measure of humanity is a cruelty the brother bombs must suffer. Given life from death, they travel west from Japan to France and later to America. Their journey is one of surreal and unsettling discovery, and author Mike Meginnis transforms these symbols of mass destruction into beacons of longing and hope.
Meginnis was inspired to write the novel when, as a student, he learned that the bombs were named. In his words:
“It made me unspeakably sad. I didn’t understand why anyone would choose to anthropomorphize such terrible weapons. To give them even a measure of humanity struck me as cruel to the bombs themselves. It gave them a ghost of agency, a fictional consciousness. It’s not much, but nobody needed to do that. I began to think about the sort of people Fat Man and Little Boy would be.”
This imaginative debut novel from Meginnis, the 2013 winner of the first Horatio Nelson Prize for Fiction, tells the story of anthropomorphic brother bombs that were “born” from the blasts of the atomic bombs Fat Man and Little Boy, which were dropped on Japan in August 1945. Fat Man resembles a “shaved bear,” while his brother, Little Boy, who is older by three days, appears “pale and pink.” While the two brothers (American like the bomb they were born from), search for food and money, they plot to leave hostile postwar Japan for France, and adopt the aliases John and Matthew for their forged passports. Their snappy dialogue, including their arguments over which brother should be in charge, is often funny. Once they arrive in France, the brothers take menial jobs working in a restaurant until they run afoul of the police due to their lustful misdeeds. They meet Rosie Cummings, who runs a hotel in southern France, and she hires the brothers to come work for her. Over time, Fat Man grows larger, decides to marry Rosie, and they have a daughter, Maggie, whom Little Boy adores. By 1956, with their shady past catching up to them, Fat Man and Little Boy relocate with their family to the U.S., and ultimately end up in Hollywood. Meginnis’s story is both surprising and incisive. - Publishers Weekly
"In his inventive and fabulist debut novel Fat Man and Little Boy Mike Meginnis lends a surprisingly human dimension to the atomic bombs dropped on Japan during World War II."— Largehearted Boy
"In Fat Man and Little Boy, Mike Meginnis takes the mother of all atrocities and makes it strange, sizable, turns it so sideways that we're forced to notice, to take heed. This alone is an achievement, but it's the way he does it that dazzle—with gorgeous, careful prose that gives us human failings and a desperate longing for connection so vividly rendered that we have no choice but drink it in, to reckon once again with this disaster in our own time and way."— Amber Sparks
"Mike Meginnis is my favorite kind of writer—extraordinarily inventive, formally curious, profoundly moving—and his Fat Man and Little Boy is a debut of impressive ambition, a reinvention of the historical novel, an existential thriller powered by the booming engines of history, the atom, the human heart." — Matt Bell
"Mike Meginnis writes with lasers. His prose is that exacting, that sharp. Every page feels crafted, shaped, almost perfect. Each sentence feels singular but also part of the whole, and the whole is something to behold. This book will unsettle you in all the best ways." — Lindsay Hunter
"Fat Man and Little Boy doesn't at all feel like a debut novel. Mike Meginnis writes like an old pro, entirely in control and in charge of this strange and haunted world. His prose is tight as hell, yet powerful, poignant and poetic. There isn't a single wasted word or misstep in the story of these troubled and unforgettable brothers."— Robert Lopez
"In this auspicious debut novel, Mike Meginnis charts a course for two itinerant brother bombs, Fat Man and Little Boy, with a wild and tender fabulist historical imagination. Among the many things I admire here is the overwhelming sense of language's displacement of history: Fat Man and Little Boy, made of flesh and bone, who exploded when they were born . . . This is language and literary form grappling with atrocity—and finally delivering us from it. It is difficult to imagine a more humane task for writing."— Evan Lavender-Smith
"Only someone with the deftness of heart of a writer like Mike Meginnis could redefine the war novel into something like Fat Man and Little Boy, a book which translates our basic world of never-ending terror into a highly nuanced and inventive diorama available absolutely nowhere else." — Blake Butler
I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds, Robert Oppenheimer claimed to have thought upon seeing the destruction wrought by the first test bomb in Nevada. And if he did think that (because Oppenheimer was not only a brilliant man, but also an assiduous cultivator of his own legend) he was right. Despite some recent competition from mass epidemics and rogue comet strikes, nuclear conflict still lies close to the top of our list of Things That Might Send Us the Way of the Dinosaurs. The dropping of the bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima provided a brutal full stop to the war in the Pacific; an act we have remained conflicted about ever since. Thinking changes, with time. The idea that the bombs saved lives (by demonstrating to the maniacally committed Japanese that surrender was preferable to annihilation) has given way over the decades to a more realistic view. We can’t take back what we did, but we can look upon the destruction we wrought and feel regret.
And what better way to explore that regret than by putting a human face to the two engines of death? Fat Man and Little Boy emerge from the devastated cities and bear witness to the effects of their detonations. Their journey involves litters of piglets, burning trees, an Oriental spirit medium bristling with peacock feather decked needles like some acupuncturist’s nightmare, conjoined infants, unexplained pregnancies, identical twin movie actors, mysteriously growing mold (mushroom clouds anyone?), inadvisable bike stunts (don’t try this at home kids), Kamikaze pilots and a hotel set up in the grounds of a former concentration camp.
Through all this, Fat Man and Little Boy stumble. They aren’t much good at being human, although Fat Man does eventually settle down and attempt to raise a family. With guileless prose, Meginnis uses his two heroes to gently skewer America, the holocaust industry and war movies, which makes for a reading experience similar to being pummeled by a Mickey Mouse with giant plush hands – delightfully, perversely enjoyable. I loved every minute of it.
What will Meginnis produce next? I can honestly say I have no inkling. But I can say I’m looking forward to it. - Cath Murphy
The author T.C. Boyle in the preface to his book “Stories II” published last year made a convincing argument that runs counter to the conventional wisdom to “write what you know.” Boyle said: “A story is an exercise of imagination — or, as Flannery O’Connor has it, an act of discovery.”
Enter Mike Meginnis and his novel “Fat Man and Little Boy,” which takes the bombings of Hirsohima and Nagasaki as the nexus for an oddly impressive debut novel. The book follows the two bombs — the eponymous brothers who have been made flesh — as they grapple with the enormity of what they did, their earthly forms and what is to come.
Meginnis, 28, wrote the novel while completing a Master of Fine Arts graduate degree at New Mexico State University. His manuscript won the inaugural Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize, which earned him a publishing deal with Black Balloon Publishing. As his publisher’s biography notes, Meginnis has never set foot outside the United States. So this was a work of imagination. And research.
“Being open to being surprised and to discovering things that you wouldn’t expect is a wonderful way to get things in that you can’t make up,” Meginnis says of his research. “Stuff that’s happened is usually so much stranger than the things you make up — that’s sort of a cliche, but it’s true. If you were to make up what happened to people as a result of the bombs I don’t think you would believe it. I think you have to see the photos… So I think if you don’t use a lot of research in your fiction you are missing out on a lot of opportunities.”
Meginnis trawled through archival photos, documentaries and reportage in building a framework for his novel. Two books in particular were instrumental to Meginnis’ understanding of World War II in Japan, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s “Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers” and Bernard Millot’s “Divine Thunder: The Life and Death of the Kamikazes” — especially in forming the character Masumi, a failed kamikaze pilot turned medium surrounded by ghosts, who can see the brothers for what they are: death.
The idea for the book came from a class about how war is depicted in film.
“There was an assignment where I went and read some old news weeklies like Time covering the week before and after the bombs were dropped,” says Meginnis.
The assignment awakened memories of the two bombs and their strange nicknames.
“Seeing these reports I immediately imagined them as brothers,” says Meginnis. “That was the intuitive leap I made.”
The brothers are united in the devastation of the atomic fallout. The novel straddles a hybrid genre of historical magical realism: There are obvious examples of real events, foremost being the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagaski, but Meginnis keeps the focus on the two brothers; the harrowing aftermath could be anywhere.
“I definitely played fast and loose with some of the geography,” admits Meginnis.
One other image stayed with him while he wrote the book, one which will resonate with a lot of people in Japan: a scene from Studio Ghibli’s classic “My Neighbor Totoro.”
“You know the scene where they are waiting for the bus in the rain?” asks Meginnis. “I just immediately imagined Fat Man and Little Boy in that scene trying to share an umbrella, but they couldn’t because Fat Man is too big. That doesn’t happen in the book, of course, but that was sort of the image that guided the mood of the whole book for me.”
Fat Man and Little Boy are strange siblings and hard to like — they are conflicted and, like most brothers, nearly always in conflict.
“The point of connection (with the brothers) is the sense of self-loathing that they have,” says Meginnis.
Of the two, Fat Man ends up taking control, as Little Boy is stunted, both physically and mentally. They hatch a plan to obtain forged passports and escape Japan, and their responsibility for its destruction — although you wonder what they could have done in atonement. What could anyone do after that?
The novel, despite its themes or because of them, is not without its humor, such as when the two brothers discuss where to go after Japan.
“Why France?” says Little Boy.
“They were barely in the war, and the food is supposed to be good.”
“Does it always have to be food?”
In France, Matthew and John, as the two bombs are called, fall in with a host of characters, chief of which is Rosie, a war widow who opens a hotel on the site of a former concentration camp and whose aim is to encourage multilingualism as the ultimate deterrent against war, as well as the aforementioned Masumi.
The strength (and weakness) of Meginnis’ book is in his language, often lucid, sometimes lurid and sometimes oblique. Through Fat Man and Little Boy the reader is forced to reckon with what these brothers have done.
“In a lot of ways (the book) is about shame,” says Meginnis. “For me it’s more about the feeling of being implicated in something terrible, and how you live as a person who is a part of a culture that has done terrible, frightening things and how you live with your personal responsibility in that suffering — and how you know where it ends.” - J.J. O'Donoghue
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